Opinion Brief: Monday, September 15, 2014

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Good evening, subscribers. Summer’s gone — and good riddance. We’ve got a brand-new sitting of Parliament, a budget surplus waiting in the wings and, hanging over the horizon, what promises to be the hardest-fought election in decades. Who doesn’t love September?

Tasha Kheiriddin reports on the oddly subdued tone of the new session’s Day One and Stephen Harper’s recent shift towards martial rhetoric in response to various world crises: For the Conservatives, bad news can be good for business. “Indeed, a dangerous world may be their best hope for re-election. Their central message — we’re the ones to trust in times of trouble — simply wouldn’t resonate in happier times.”

News that the Canada-China Foreign Investment Protection Agreement takes effect in two weeks came down — in the time-honoured practice of governments everywhere trying to bury bad news — via government release late Friday. Small wonder, says Devon Black: The FIPA is a half-baked collection of vague rules giving foreign investors sweeping privileges in Canadian law that might not survive a constitutional challenge. So why the rush? “Prime Minister Harper visits China in November. He’d probably prefer to be shaking hands in photo ops rather than fielding uncomfortable questions about Chinese hacking. If that’s truly the motivation behind the government’s sudden push to get FIPA into force, it’s an awfully expensive sop to Harper’s vanity.”

While we’re on the topic, here’s Bloomberg’s William Pesek sounding the alarm again about how China’s accumulation of bad debt threatens the world with another global recession. “A Chinese crash would hammer commodities markets, industries from manufacturing to high tech, and the sovereign and corporate credit ratings of export-reliant economies … It would be an untimely blow to the U.S. and an increasingly fragile Europe.”

And finally, Jeffrey Goldberg sits down with Republican arch-interventionist John McCain to talk about how American public opinion is starting to break his way, thanks to the brutal depravity displayed by Islamic State in Iraq. “Three-quarters of those polled said action against Islamic State should consist of at least air strikes, and 34 per cent said they would support the use of ground troops as well. The question is, will this new spirit survive initial contact with the enemy?”